Bangladesh lifted a ban on Facebook yesterday, a week after it blocked the popular social networking site over caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed and “obnoxious” images of its leaders.
The Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) ordered the country’s international Internet gateway providers to unblock the site after the US-based company agreed to remove the offending images and content.
“Facebook is now open,” BTRC vice chairman Hasan Mahmud Delwar said.
The move came after Pakistan lifted a similar ban on Facebook last week following a court order. Islamabad had blocked Facebook, video Web site YouTube and 1,200 Web pages over a row about “blasphemous” content on the Internet.
Bangladesh banned Facebook on May 29 after officials said cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed posted on the site “hurt the religious sentiments of the country’s Muslim population.”
Thousands of people belonging to Muslim groups staged protests over the cartoons which they branded “anti-Islamic propaganda” and demanded the site be banned.
About 90 percent of Bangladesh’s 144 million people are Muslims who regard depictions of Islam’s prophet as blasphemous.
The BTRC had also said that some links in Facebook contained “obnoxious” images of the country’s leaders including the prime minister and that the site would be reopened after the pages had been blocked.
The country’s anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion arrested one man over the images of the political leaders.
Bangladesh’s telecoms authority contacted Facebook and said the US-based site had agreed to act.
“We are satisfied with the removal of offensive items by the Facebook team. And now it’s again open for all,” BTRC chairman Zia Ahmed told the Daily Star, adding that Bangladesh would “strongly monitor the postings on the site.”
There was no comment from Facebook, but the Daily Star quoted a letter of the Web site’s chief security officer Joe Sullivan to the BTRC saying his company would “promote safe use of Facebook in Bangladesh.”
Facebook would “work through and establish detailed processes for removing troubling content in the future,” Sullivan was quoted as saying in the letter.
Bangladesh has nearly 1 million Facebook account holders — a sixth of all Internet users, BTRC said.
The ban triggered counter-protests by students in the country’s major universities, intellectuals and the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
Last year, Bangladesh also blocked YouTube for several days after the video site hosted a recording of an angry dispute between Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and army officers over a deadly military mutiny.
The site has previously attracted government ire over allegations it spreads pornography and fraudulent money-making schemes.
In March, police officers arrested a Dhaka-based stocks tipster with more than 10,000 Facebook followers on charges of manipulating Bangladesh’s stock exchange.
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